Stage To Screen

“Jersey Boys” and “Venus in Fur.”

There was a moment in Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” (1990) when Karen (Lorraine Bracco) went to find Henry (Ray Liotta) after he stood her up for dinner. She confronted him, and asked, “Who the hell do you think you are, Frankie Valli or some kind of big shot?” I remember thinking what an unlikely name it was for Karen to pluck from the air. What was it, exactly, that gave a guy the right to disrespect a girl—was it the fame, or the falsetto? Now we have “Jersey Boys,” directed by Clint Eastwood, which gives us a fresh chance to measure just how big a shot little Frankie was.

For the first third of the movie, it is Scorsese territory that Eastwood muscles in on. We are in New Jersey, in the nineteen-fifties, and young Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), cockiness made flesh, addresses us head on: “You want to hear the real story?” The model here is Liotta, in “Goodfellas,” whose voice-over buoyed us through the storms of the action. He never talked to the camera, however, whereas Tommy can stroll out of prison, after an easy six months for theft and other lapses, and engage us in conversation outside the gates. His breeziness is catchy, and you can sense the movie tuning up to make sweet music. But Eastwood, the maker of “Mystic River” (2003) and a Charlie Parker biopic, “Bird” (1988), is not someone to let darkness slip away. Many of the early scenes are staged for shudders and thrills, with a cursing match that ends in a gunshot, and a safe being manhandled into the trunk of a car, as Tommy and his confrères oil themselves into a life of crime. You ask yourself, What kind of movie does “Jersey Boys” want to be?

A clue comes one night as Tommy and a friend get up to mischief, leaving Frankie Castelluccio (John Lloyd Young) as their lookout man on the sidewalk. A cop approaches, on his beat, and Frankie gives the alarm, not with a yell or a whistle but with a song—his high, effortless tone ringing off the walls of the deserted street. If nightingales listened to Sinatra, they would sound like that, and the sequence allows Eastwood to put the overwhelming question: How do you make trouble and music at the same time? Castelluccio will change his name to Valli; he will team up with DeVito, Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda), and Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen) to create the Four Seasons; they will rise and conquer; and yet, all the while, we will be reminded just how quickly life can slide off key.

The movie is based on the stage musical, which was shiny and crisp, and so streamlined that you walked out at the end with the tunes ringing in your head and every scrap of plot, let alone of emotional setback, left under your seat like a candy wrapper. As with all jukebox theatre, it asked us to believe that creativity is no sweat; that, once inspiration descends, you strap on your ready-tuned guitar, step up to the mike, and unleash. Some of this pleasant nonsense remains in Eastwood’s film. We get the guys clustered around a phone, pouring the start of “Sherry” into the ear of Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), their producer, who informs them that, by chance, he has tapes set up to record; and we get the eureka look that dawns on Gaudio’s face, as Crewe, watching “Ace in the Hole,” on TV, explains the allure of the heroine—“big girls don’t cry.” That’s the new single taken care of, right there. Some tales are even tall and true; apparently, the band, having hopped from one name to another, really did emerge from a bowling alley called the Four Seasons and make the change. In the movie, it becomes a sight gag: a repairman fixes the sign outside, the name flashes up, and Nick exclaims, “It’s a sign!”

Sparks like that are scattered through, and yet the sad fact is that “Jersey Boys” is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished. The screenplay is by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice, and there are shades of “Annie Hall,” which Brickman wrote with Woody Allen, in the constant shuffle of styles. Look at Nick, turning aside to the camera, as the Four Seasons play live on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and talking to us about the band’s problems. We get yanked two years into the past, for a lengthy flashback about the boys getting arrested over a hotel bill and Tommy’s obligations to a loan shark. Contractual wrangles ensnare the rest of the movie, interspersed with odd revisits to Frankie’s home life. Renée Marino, making her big-screen début as his wife, Mary, has one terrific scene, when they first meet and she tells him to pick Valli over Vally (“ ’cause ‘Y’ ’s a bullshit letter”), but then she fades from view. Suddenly, the marriage is in ruins, and Frankie is comforting his daughter Francine (Elizabeth Hunter), of whose existence we are hardly aware; as the parents split, a couple of other daughters appear from nowhere. Francine gets a subplot to herself, and a fine song, “My Eyes Adored You,” is the result, but by now the film is taking random directions as if wondering where they will lead.

All this seems precisely unsuited to the talents of Clint Eastwood. He is a master of the clean, classical narrative, not of lurching moods and similar folderol. In “Bird,” he and his star, Forest Whitaker, kept the focus squarely on the person of Parker, and took care not to stray too far from the music. So how come, in “Jersey Boys,” we get the instrumental introduction to “December, 1963” at the start, but no straight rendition of it, with the explosive vocal line (“Oh, what a night”), until the end credits, when Eastwood decides to turn his film into “West Side Story” and have the whole cast—including characters who have died—show up and dance in the street? As a sendoff, it’s fun, not least because Christopher Walken, who has popped up here and there as a mafioso figure named Gyp DeCarlo, gets to show us his ageless moves, but it feels too late and not a little desperate. Still more remiss is Frankie’s final tribute to the time—the best ever, he says—when it was “just four guys under a street light.” Oops, we never actually saw that time, so it has to be quickly drummed up for our delight as the film stumbles to a close.

Against that, I’m glad to say, we get “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”—a mold-breaker, written by Crewe and Gaudio, which premièred at the Roostertail club, in Detroit, with diners sitting at tables, not knowing what’s coming. Eastwood gets to flourish his dramatic command and his love of the music at the same time: waiting for the buildup after the verse, he pulls back a curtain behind the band to reveal a shining brass section and its full-throated blare, before Frankie surges back in with the chorus—“I love you, baby.” The crowd stands to applaud. It’s a clear echo of a lovely scene in “The Glenn Miller Story,” in which everything locked into place at a performance of “Moonlight Serenade.” That film was directed by Anthony Mann—a forerunner of Eastwood, both men making mighty contributions to the Western and venturing further afield. But Mann held his nerve and told the Miller story as calmly as it deserved, letting the music take care of the excitement. Eastwood, with the weight of the stage production on his back, is unable to relax. “Jersey Boys” has its highs, but too often you can take your eyes off it. Whenever possible, trust your ears.

The new Roman Polanski film, “Venus in Fur,” is set entirely, or almost entirely, in a theatre. Outside, thunder groans on a rainy Paris boulevard; inside, alone, is Thomas (Mathieu Amalric), who has written a play, “Venus in Fur,” and is directing it himself. Today, audition day, has been frustrating, but, just as he is packing up to go, a latecomer arrives. She is soaked to the skin, with a lot of skin to soak, removing her raincoat to reveal no more than underwear. In one sense, it’s a perfect fit: she is named Vanda (Emmanuelle Seigner), and so is her character—a decorous vamp, encountered at a country inn, in 1870. Thomas has forged the play from a notorious novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and the clue is in that name. Welcome to the zone of dog collars, whips, and the scuffed paraphernalia of submission and control. Vanda will do more than read for the role. She will become it.

In truth, the heart deflates at this, for the trappings of such naughtiness creak like old leather. Furthermore, the film itself is adapted from a play by David Ives, and Polanski’s other borrowings from the theatre, like “Death and the Maiden” and “Carnage,” have felt more like exercises than like immersions. Now, though, miraculously, he brightens the faded material, and conjures his most graceful work in years, guiding his camera in a dance around the confined arena and permitting his actors—just the two of them—to duck so freely in and out of character that the wall between the real and the imagined feels no thicker than stretched silk. Even the shortage of props is more of a help than a handicap: when Thomas taps a coffee cup with an unseen spoon, or Vanda cracks an invisible whip, we hear the tinkle and the lash. As the film tightens, the playwright is not merely upstaged but engulfed by his fictional creation. What painful joy it is, Polanski suggests, to be a slave to the rhythm of art. ♦